


Pearl Diving and Other Magical Acts

by drawlight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angels, Canon Compliant, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Style, Fallen Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Falling In Love, First Kiss, Forbidden Love, Healing, Heartache, Immortality, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Pining, Profound Bond Gift Exchange, Romance, Romantic Soulmates, Sleeping Beauty Elements, Snow Queen Elements, Soulmates, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-11-24 17:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18167945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: There are no such things as fairytales.Except maybe the one about the angel with the human heart.How does it go?Oh yes, that's right,Once Upon A Time.





	Pearl Diving and Other Magical Acts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JessJesstheBest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessJesstheBest/gifts).



> For JessJesstheBest, who asked for soulmates and a fairytale. I hope I can come close to what you asked for with this.

 

_Ὄπτιασ ἄμμε._

_“You burn me.”_

Sappho, Fragment 38.

If Not, Winter, Anne Carson (trans.)

 

Child, child, sit. Get in bed. Get your drink of water. It is twenty minutes past. (Are the covers up, the blankets right?) Let me tell you a story. Would you like a fairy tale?

“Yes, tell me a story.”

Very well. Let me tell you about fairytales. Fairytales, despite our best efforts, are not real. The girl in the coma does not wake by true love’s kiss. Cinderella never went to the ball. And the mermaid, that poor scaled creature, once wound up nearly seafoam on the waves. Still, we hope. (Foolish thing, _hope._ That miserable thing with feathers.) This is why we tell them, consider the construction of the fairytale. The horrors, the grotesque, the stolen children and the hungry witches, the goblins and the hacked-off feet. We pull out the darkness of our existence, lay it bare to the sky, to the page, give it a hero and a story, give it that precious ending. _Happily ever after._  

We cannot start at the ending. No, you won’t appreciate the light without the dark. Let’s start at the beginning. Perfectly reasonable place, the beginning. We’ll start with that awful old phrase, _once upon a time._

Once upon a time, back when God was all and was a bit lonely, he had made the heavens and the angels to keep him company. That was in the ineffable and unknowable _before._ There were no years then, no months, nor days (there had been no earth to rotate, to revolve). We cannot quantify _before_. It is an eternity, it is a breath. In _before,_ the angels, with their six faces and their six wings, had played their little lyres and slept on dandelion clouds. Then, eventually, God stirred and made the earth. This we know. Why did he make it? That is another story entirely; another passion, another hunger. 

Let me tell you the story of the little angel and his little heart, who took up pearl diving once, while standing at the edge of the ocean.

 

* * *

 

_Ancient History_

_Eden (Mostly)_

 

Once upon a time, there was an angel that stood vigil. Ramrod straight, his spine like a ruler, a guard pillar outside the garden. It was the angel’s first commission, standing there, a bit of sweat on his brow, silently watching the earth. _Go on down there,_ God had said, _go on and see what that racket’s all about._ So he had gone, this seraph, this human-whisperer. When he first had spoken to mankind, he had fumbled and shattered stone, trees, the eardrums of the ones on the ground. _“Hey,”_ another angel says, _“You gotta inhabit them. Let me show you how.”_ So the angel began to take form, borrow their little bodies. Dust, clay. It was the first time. The world was still young, the leaves still budding on the trees.

In Eden, he had met a boy.

“Your sword is on fire.”

“Yes.”

“Can I touch it?”

The angel thought, remembering what God had mentioned of the softness of human bodies. Their weaknesses to fire and steel, who cannot breathe water like fish, who have no wings to fly. "No."

“I like your eyes.” (He will never take a vessel without eyes like the sea, all because this first boy, this green-eyed and impertinent child, had once walked up, had asked to borrow a sword, had said _I like your eyes._ ) “Who are you?” the boy had asked (his own green eyes like the grass snake, _Opheodrys vernalis_ ).

“No one,” The angel had said. He had been no one, then, to men. We had not yet met God. He could not give a name because he did not yet have one. It is a common myth that God created the everything and named it then. No, all names are from men. We had stumbled out of the garden, blinked a few times, swearing mightily, and called a spade a spade. Our first impulse, naked and sweaty and _terrified,_ is to look out over the distance and shout _hey you._ The angels had come down from the firmament, one by one, to collect their little syllables, their little names.

“You can’t be _no one,”_ the boy said, frowning, biting a petal pink lip. “I’ll call you Castiel.”

And so Castiel had a name.

 

* * *

  

_2019_

_(Somewhere near) Cape Elizabeth, Maine_

 

They had come for witches.

You know how to tell a witch. Look for owls, look for left-hands, look for black cats. The devil and his covenant. They had hunted one of them up here. Tracked stories of strange forests, strange woods. Branches that move like arms stretching to catch you, roots that roll, aching for ankles to trip. They had moved through the wood, looking for something. Hex bags maybe, dead things maybe. The forest had felt too calm, the trees stretching out into an endless line to keep them company. You cannot come to the woods of the north and be alone. Something, a malevolent and sinister something is always watching.

“I _hate_ witches,” Dean had said as they walked through the forest, as they had trailed the witch and her breadcrumbs. He nosed at an owl pellet with his pistol, looking for charms. “Especially up here. At least in the south, they’re predictable. You know, a little haunting, a couple of graveyards, a voodoo doll or two. You know, turn you into a newt or something.” He had not said, _not these up here, up way in the north._ The north is always cruel. We bury the unwelcome on the northside of churches. The suicides, the poor, the unsavory. Not up here, these strange witches with their wilder magic. Unpredictable. Odd. They had been tense even on the ride up, nervous about witches and their personal space. It’s a packed car, the three of them in the oil-spill Impala. Castiel and Dean, Sam watching wheat fields out the back window (the spaces of absent fathers, for John Winchester and God; seats held just in case they come back.)

She had been just a skinny stick of a thing. They had cut the witch with an iron blade, sharpened on a whetstone. Iron shavings still on it. Burnt her body in the back of the wood, behind her little cabin. Her little wolf too.

The witch and her wolf against the huntsmen. The werewolf in the full moon, sinking his teeth, twisted and pale, into the shoulder of Dean’s jacket, into the meat of Dean’s body, breaking the bone beneath the strong locked jaw, the blood flowing like rivers. Like Phlegethon, the blood river of the dead. The redness of the blood had been everywhere (is still everywhere). On his clothes, in his mouth, under his fingernails. Dean had smelled like metal, like pennies, like a fired pistol. Castiel is no stranger to broken bodies. He has caused so much death but he winces to look at Dean’s shoulder, at the teeth that have savaged the flesh, the sinew. It looks like raw meat, ground chuck. Blood like a smashed pomegranate, crushed seeds against pale concrete.

The witch of the north, of the cold, queen of ice and of snow. Sam had driven the blade between her ribs, right there between the fourth and the fifth, had pulled the blade and twisted it, shattering the witch into thousands of ice crystals. _Close your eyes, close your mouth._ Castiel had clenched his eyes shut, pressed his lips together like ashlar masonry in old castles. Stone laid upon stone. One piece. Tiny, invisible, a little nothing, passed through Dean’s pupil. (Dean has always been bad at impulse, at following directions, at shutting his eyes when he should.) Frozen into nothing, stilled to only breath, he had passed out on the floor, unconscious, still with a shard of the witch in his eye. It had taken both Sam and Castiel to carry him into the cabin. Put him on the bed, pull the covers up, the little knit throw.

It has been eleven hours since the attack. Castiel had shot the wolf between the eyes, a clean break between hemispheres of the creature’s brain. Dead now. Good riddance. The force of the gunshot had left spatters of skull and brain all over the three of them. Had stuck and dried there on his cheek. He brushes fur from his jacket, from Dean’s jeans. The blood is sticky, mostly dried now. The fur sticks to it. His own hair does too, like a strange tarring and feathering.

“We’re past the worst of it,” Sam says, reading the depth of Dean’s reactions. Unconsciousness is not a yes or no question. It is not black or white, up or down, in or out. There are shades of consciousness. Sam references the Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing Dean’s body, his breathing, his response. Dean is somewhere between a one and a two. He does not open his eyes but makes weak grunts when pinched, when a needle is poked at the bottom of his foot.

 _Past the worst of it._ Castiel nods. Sam tells him to go take a walk, buy some bread. Castiel’s knuckles are still white, his hands are cramped. He doesn’t know how to release them. He moves toward the door in the dark, his footsteps creaking on the landing, hands trailing along the wainscot. Pass the etchings of burning witches. Of Alice Nutter, burnt to a crisp in the Pendle trials of 1612, body fat burning like tallow. He finds the doorknob by the moonlight and fingerpads. He has no idea where to go. 

He walks to the shore. Looks at the girl fiddling with her mask. It is May, the water at the shore is still cold. Winter still hides there, in the waves, the icebox sea. The ocean is the last to let things go. She is young, a child still. Perhaps thirteen, fourteen, shaking the roll of the land out from her legs, her arms, bending at the waist.

“What are you doing?”

“Diving for pearls.”

He watches for awhile, her arms straight, the jump and the snap below the surface tension. The nothing of the splash, water opening like arms to welcome her back. The water loves us, loves humanity. We came from it, you know that. We know it in our bones, the genetic memory of the little eukaryotic creatures we once were. We miss the waves, the sea, the sway of to and fro. Once you see the shore, you can never forget the sea. It drives men to madness, this old ache of water.

After four minutes, she surfaces. The little netting bag of oysters in her hand, knife in the other. He can smell the salt on her. Divers, who live half their lives underwater. She will wash it off later, this layer of salt, but the layers are too many and too deep. The little soap won’t get them all, she will always be a pillar of salt.

 

* * *

 

Unwind the gauze, peel it off from the wound, clean up the edges. Bit of water, bit of rubbing alcohol. Wrap it back up again. White. The blood is stopped but the wound still seeps a little. It looks clean, though Sam and Castiel both still watch, suspicious of infection. Sam sighs when he worries. Runs his long fingers through his sandy hair, his forehead wrinkling and smoothing out over and over again, like waves at the sandbar.

Castiel prefers silence. He has sat vigil for millennia. Harder now, here in a body that sweats, a heartrate that elevates, the press of sickness at the back of his throat. He doesn’t run a hand through his gunpowder hair, doesn’t sigh, hardly breathes. He waits. He doesn’t talk about the part that guts him. The little secret wrapped up there, within his chest. Buried under his ribs, a dark pearl.

Every fairy tale has a monster. Has a threat. When Castiel sees the terror of his own story, he does not realize it at first. Castiel had loved earth, spends more time on earth than any of his brothers and sisters. But there are rules, there are limits. God had said, “ _You’re my man on earth, Castiel. I need you to understand them, report back. I will give you a human heart.”_ And Castiel had accepted, for God loves in all ways, for one does not question His wisdom, for earth and its creatures are glorious.

Castiel and his human heart.

Let us talk about the anatomy of hearts. Human hearts are created like light was created. You cannot have light without dark, so you cannot have one heart without another. We are born incomplete, reaching out for the remainder of ourselves. Your aorta is mine, my ventricles are yours. Clumsy little bits of dust, humanity. (Do you now see the problem, child?) Castiel had forgotten, in his hurry, about the other half of his heart. No human heart escapes this. It is the very definition of it. _Want._ Built into the very walls of the fist-sized muscle, woven into the two-thousands gallons of blood pumped through it each day.

He looks at the sky, aching for home. When he is home, he aches for away. Two-part Castiel, never settled anywhere, always dreaming. Later, when men start to wander further, out of Africa, out of the Fertile Crescent, Castiel is the only one who thinks he understands what it is to want, to wonder. He is here; he craves _there._ Simple, really. (It isn’t.)

When he was first given the heart, he had eaten ducks whole. Plucked, yes, even washed. Cooked. The knife and fork left to the side, he eats too impatiently, wishing he could remove his soft palate, unhook his jaw, swallow the entire thing whole. Men spend years polishing their appetites, understanding hunger. Castiel had never experienced hunger before, so he had pulled the lid off of the plate and shoved it, as much as he could, into his mouth. After the plate is empty, after the bones are picked clean, he had laid on the dirt floor, groaning and thinking about supernovas, about explosions, about the tension of his stomach.

 

* * *

 

They’d tracked the witch to a little town on the edge of the Atlantic. The white pine, the edge of the world. Lobster boats and butter. Rocky shorelines. Oysters and their divers. Maine is a liminal space. The edge of land, the edge of a nation. Drivers along the east coast dream about keeping on keeping on, driving on up past Maryland, past New Jersey and New York, past New Hampshire, onto Maine. The winter is never far here, always hesitating at the edge. The witches draw their power from ice and cold, frozen fingers, tongues stuck to metal poles. Even in May, winter still tries to hang on. It doesn’t want to forget. It sticks in the shadows, it stays in the ocean. It will come back again.

They stare at each other in the little cabin, he and Sam. Cleaning guns, playing chess. Reading. Castiel watches birds. Returning for the summer to this boreal land. He lists them as he sees them, trying to remember so that he can tell Dean later. (There must be a later, after all.) The storm-petrel, razorbills, black-beaked woodpeckers, yellow-bellied flycatchers. Canadian geese. The cabin is bare. What does he find in the cabinets? Tinned tomatoes, expired tuna, brown rice, a message in a bottle. A few sardines. He eats those, Sam curling his nose. They taste like the metal of the can. Like the bit of blood in his mouth. Metallic, coppery. Everything in the cabin is old. The electrical outlets only work between ten o’clock and two o’clock. Drawers with various lengths of wire, scattered white vinyl rope, marine-ply. Some lifevests too, in a chest by the door. Escallonia outside, along the path to the lake.

 _Breathe, Dean, breathe._ “That’s one hell of a bite wound,” Sam mutters, “You sure you’re outta your mojo?”

“Yes,” Castiel grits. _Please, Father, please. Let Dean live._ (Castiel is nothing and no longer. He is as made of mud and spit as the rest of us, reduced to prayer.) How long has Castiel lived? They do not talk about it, they cannot. Dean shies away from the edges of Castiel’s temporary humanity. _Fallen._ He will go back to the sky. But now, he has no power to draw upon. Cannot knit Dean’s body back together. This tear in the skin by the wolf. The lycanthrope. Big bad. The platelets of Dean’s blood will knit him back up again where Castiel cannot. Scar him over. Where his scars lay, his skin is unlikely to be torn again. What about the bacteria in the wolf’s mouth? Does it filthy Dean’s blood, red and innocent? The white blood cells having never seen these invaders before, these odd visitors, holding their lanterns up and asking _who’s there?_

He holds his hands over Dean’s wound, feeling the heartbeat in the pulse of blood. More now, less now. Hand with no grace to offer. _What good is this?_

The candle burns down. His pulse in his throat, blocking his swallow. He waits. At the edge of the world. A rocky shore. The little light from the lighthouse nearby points out into the dark.

_Do not go where I cannot follow. (Do not go down, down, down below the waves. I am not a strong swimmer, not without Grace. You don’t belong down there, in the sand and the coral, with the sea urchins and the carpet sharks, the long strands of seaweed like dead men’s arms, the mollusks and oysters. Don’t go gentle into that good night; don’t go gentle into that deep sea.)_

 

* * *

 

Once upon a time, Castiel, Warrior of God, had met Dean Winchester, Aquarius.

“Who are you?” Dean had asked, covered in blood and spit and still some gravedirt there, behind his left ear. The barn in Illinois, the smell of hay assaulting their senses. Pig shit, leather. Saddle smell.

“Castiel.”

“Yeah, I figured that much. I mean what are you?” For being underground for so long, his skin was still sunkissed. His nose sharp and straight. Knives could have used it as a guide. Eyes like rockpools, floating kelp, the bottom of a pond.

“I’m an Angel of the Lord.”

“Get the hell outta here, there’s no such thing.” Isn’t there? Dean had known it was the truth before he had asked. Before spectral wings painted the walls of a barn. All fairytales are based in truth. Hunters keep the truth. A thin, bullet-armed veil between the truth and the world. _Tell me about little Red and the Wolf?_ We know how it ends, the blood against the floorboards, the wolf with an arm in his jaw. Full moon.

Castiel had remade Dean, had remade him exactly the way that Dean had been set forth previously by DNA and riboflavin. Put the bones back, the hair back, the spit back. Wind the intestines up, tuck the liver away, close the ribcage around the heart. Funny thing, that heart. Castiel, having pieced it back together, knows it intimately, fitting perfectly against his own.

He had never had a name for it, the heart equation. But one day, Dean had popped the cap off of an All Day IPA and leaned against the counter. His jeans as wrinkled as the growing cobwebs at his eyes, the corner of his mouth, the hook of his square jaw. Forty now. Normalcy had crept up on them like a heart attack. The bunker like a house, like an address. Buy milk, sweep the floor, salt the windows.

“Do you believe in soulmates, Cas?”

“Pardon?”

“Yeah, you know, the idea that there’s one perfect person out there.”

“The odds of that are infinitesimal, Dean,” Castiel had tilted his head slightly, trying to understand _perfect._ Is _perfect_ an abstraction? A math puzzle? Can humans be added up, their values and demerits, and figured to a sum? Is there a goal? Do we aim for similar values or those that make up our differences? Is _perfect_ subjective? Who gets to choose? Which partner? Or a bystander, an angel, perhaps God?

“No, I mean like,” Dean had looked up at the ceiling for a minute, at the bare lightbulb, briefly scrunching an eye and yawning a bit, “Like there’s another person out there that just _fits_ you. You know?”

 _Oh._ That’s what that whole thing is about then. Soulmates. There are a few stories that Castiel does not know. He cannot sort them out from the detritus of encompassing knowledge. Where did humans learn of soulmates? There is no historical seed, no angelic equivalent. Purely human thing, soulmates. Humans with their raw-edged souls, their aching emotions, promising themselves that _no, no, we are not alone._ (Aren’t they? Alone on a rock, abandoned by a disinterested God?)

Castiel had hesitated in his answer. Bit the inside of his mouth, worried his tongue up the back of his teeth, studied nutrition labels on a pack of granola bars. He has thousands, millions of years to offer Dean, but there’s nothing, in the end, of consequence. Of all that time, all he has packed up to take back with him are words. He has never been entirely good with words, he has never been a poet. Castiel has always relied on the awe of the heavenly, direct, forthright. How do you frame a story? He didn't know how to say that soulmates are real, that humans, for all of our science, have never quite figured out the nuances of the incompleteness of our hearts. He thought of the stories, stuck like a pill in the back of his throat. Alexander, who had shared a heart with Hephaestion; Alexander who had watched his blood leach into the ground at the other’s death. Napoleon, who had tried to cut out his own heart, to cast away Josephine. They had been so hungry after, trying to fill the gap where their other halves’ pulses had once been, tried to fill it up with the world.

 _I love you, Dean Winchester._ (He has loved Dean forever but this is the first time he lets it surface, up up up through the layers of his mind, into the sun, the brackish murk of human thought. There is no fighting it, how can you not love your own heart?)

 

* * *

 

But, why didn’t Castiel tell Dean about their hearts?

He was afraid, he doubted (the curse of the human heart).

That’s reasonable, isn’t it?

Reason isn’t something you should base love on, child.

What should I base it on? How will I know?

You’ll know it when it’s there (when you can’t stop yourself from screaming to the sky).

 

* * *

 

They’ve stopped the bloodloss, staved off hypovolemic shock. Dean's face and chest are still cold as an icecap, as freon in an engine block. Pile on more blankets then, this frayed quilt. Castiel lays his trenchcoat over the top. He shivers a bit, the cabin is not warm at night. No, winter still hasn't quite let go.

The past. Castiel thinks of Sodom, he thinks of Gomorrah. The names of those monstrous towns passed down to us even now, thousands of years later. Torched. Castiel had lit the thatch roofs himself, tipping the torch against the eaves, but fire does nothing against a name. Easy to burn the past, difficult to lose it.

Dean is pale, even through the dark. The depth to his wheat-painted skin is lighter, his eyes are closed, the spiderleg lashes bleak against papery skin. The hair keeps growing, the nails keep growing. In dehydration, the skin pulls back from the nailbeds, from the hair, making their growth appear more obvious, fueling rumors of vampirism. Not here, Dean’s holiness is still within him, without him. No absinthe eyes to light up with a joke about blasters, about Mortal Kombat, about the awkward way Castiel tucks the sheets around his frozen form.

Dean, how would you get past this? A sly smile in your autumn sky face, a suggestion of _up up down down left right left right B A start?_

_Don’t go anywhere. Hold on._

He lays on the saggy bed, smelling of industrial bleach, picking out spiderwebs in the corners of the rented room. He watches Dean groan through the night. Castiel, uncomfortably human, without power and saddled with hunger, eats plums one by one. They were damaged in the travel home (Cas has not yet learned how to pack a grocery bag. He does not know that milk cannot go on top of bread, that eggs should be separate, that plums can bruise.) The plums, battered themselves and leaking, are the color of Dean’s orbital ridge, his left cheekbone. Purple and mottled like an angry sky. Once upon a time, Dean Winchester, you were a bruise. Once upon a time, you were the sunset. The September sky. It is May, not his season. Castiel eats the plums, swallowing them down too quickly, making his stomach upset and sick. He doesn’t know how to pass the time. Boredom and fear. He cannot swallow down Dean, keep him safe within himself, so he eats plums instead.

 

* * *

 

It has been eighteen hours.

“He’ll be alright,” Sam says, “Let him rest.”

“I know.”

“You’re white as a ghost. And trust me, Cas, I’ve seen one or two of those.” Sam looks up from polishing a gun. Chamber out, safety on. “I know it’s not my place, but -”

Cas and his tilted head, lost in a sea of unknown context. “What?”

“You like him, don’t you?”

“I like all of you.”

“You know what I mean. Like - love.”

“I love all of my Father’s creatures.”

“You’re not fooling me.”

“It’s forbidden, Sam.”

“You’re not an angel anymore, dude.” _Aren’t I?_ He isn’t quite sure on the nuance of himself, where _not-angel_ ends and where _human_ begins. He tries to put his finger on it but it keeps breaking apart, breaking down, like spearing peas, like crushing them between your tongue and your teeth. Every time he thinks he’s got it, they roll away. He’ll find them later under the cabinets, the rolled away peas, the little bits of himself.

He goes to church on Sundays. What else should he do? (There is a difference between the apostate and the unbeliever. Castiel believes, though he reads Satan’s part of _Paradise Lost_ voraciously. He sits out on the little patch of grass, cross-legged, mouthing _what though the field be lost_ to the sky.)

Is this how the wolf had felt when it had sunk into Dean? This unquenchable hunger, this desperate thirst? _I love you._ There is no option for angels, no middle ground. They love in strange ways, consumptive ways. No friend of nuance. How many times have we argued with the angels, with the sky, saying _no no no not quite like that?_ Angels see black and white, up and down, Heaven and Hell. Humans are more nuanced, made up of exceptions.

Dean Winchester, born to Aquarius, born to the air, who walks the earth. Castiel had once mentioned that he had no astrological sign, that he had not been born, that when he winked into being, time and stars had not yet existed. “I think you’re a Virgo, buddy,” Dean had said once, engine grease still under his fingernails, “Dunno, just a feeling I have.” It makes sense, Castiel, born to earth, who walks in Heaven. Their shared hearts, extensions of each other, equal and opposite.

He wants. It feels monstrous to want someone like this. He is unused to desire, to ache, to want, to being incomplete.

Not all monsters are hideous. He had been being of sublime beauty, of wide power (if he had squinted wrong, he could have wiped out Lawrence.) He tries to put his finger on the meat of it. Castiel No-One, Former angel. How can you be defined by what you are not? He isn’t sure so he tries to add up the facts. Castiel is a man who never lets the pan get hot enough. During their week here, hunting wolves, he has been cooking fish caught from the lake. Whitefish and trout. He watches videos, watches chefs carefully explaining that you gotta use a good pan, a nice carbonsteel or stainless, let it get screaming hot. Put the oil in, bring it to the point of scorching. Shimmering, loose in the pan. Then lay the fillet in, skin side down, into the oil. (Away from yourself, avoid the splatter, avoid the burn.) Castiel never waits. Anxious, unsure, hungry. The skin sticks to the pan, burnt up little bits stuck to the bottom.

He sits next to the bed. Says nothing, unsure if Dean’s name is his to call. He is a thief, though stealing is a sin. He steals little glances, little brushes of hand against arm. The sound of Dean’s name in his voice, lying by omission, not offering it up. It is time again for inventory. Check the reflexes, the legs and the arms. Check the temperature, the clammy forehead. Look at the tongue. Pull back the slack eyelids and look there at the bottle-fly irises, the stygian pupils.

There is a strange blue in the iris, holding back the light. Castiel frowns, gets the little bottle of eyedrops from the knapsack at the door. Flush the eye. _There, did I get it?_

Strange. Must have been a trick of the light. Blue isn’t right. No, the sky cannot claim Dean. It has enough of him, it should be satisfied. Castiel thinks of God and his little inside jokes. Soulmates (he knows the words now) always wear the holiness of their heartmate in their eyes. Castiel should have been born to the earth, Dean has eyes green as grass, as leaves, as vines. Dean was born to a sharp blue winter sky, Castiel has eyes like cornflowers, like the Arctic Ocean, like the center of a flame.  _Out, out, damn spot._ He cannot see it anymore. Cannot. _Thank god._ This is his, his little want. Even if Dean never knows, this is his moment of summertime, reaching out to winter’s child with hands of soil and dirt, of chlorophyll and creeping ivy, saying _hold on hold on hold on._

(He is deep, deep, further down. Castiel descends. What is here at the ocean floor? The weight of water stifles him, he does not have the spleens that the Bajau of Indonesia have evolved, little stores of extra oxygen-rich blood. He searches for treasure. Shipwrecks, lost wedding rings, pearls maybe.)

 

* * *

 

 _“_ Cas,” Dean croaks from the bed. Castiel knocks over a chair. “Dude, you look like shit.”

_Yes, Dean, yes, of course I do. I am terrified. You assume that we have an end, you assume that we will eventually get there, that all years are our own. Look at you, a pint away from death. Heaven is not always open to me, to you, to anyone. It opens sometimes, closes sometimes. Inhales us, spits us back out again. Time might march on, but there’s no assuming that we’ll be there throughout it. They call it a fabric, the fabric of time and space. You and I are little threads, red as hearts and blood and skinned muscle, piercing in and out of it. We start somewhere and must therefore stop. What am I afraid of? Parallel lines, that you and I might run next to each other and never intersect._

“Then again,” Dean says, “I probably ain’t so fresh myself. Regular fuckin’ Bog of Eternal Stench right here. Good god, how are you sitting so close?” He wrinkles his nose up. Up close, his eyes are the color of grass and aphids.

“You’re very beautiful, Dean.”

“Cas, man,” Dean says, voice dusty, “You can’t just _say_ that shit to me.”

“Why not?”

“Beautiful is for girls, ya know?”

“Why does it matter?”

Dean laughs, dry dry wind. “Right, I’m talking to a fucking junkless celestial being.” He pauses, waves his hand, “Just trust me, alright?”

“Dean,” Castiel pauses, weighing the world in his hands. Considering oceans and their depths. To dive is to hold your breath against a world we cannot live within. We have no rights to water. To reach the oysters, to reach the treasure, our bodies must be risked.

“Hey buddy,” Dean says, “Look, let’s just-“

“Dean.”

“Do they give classes up there on How To Be A Dick?” Dean says, rolling his eyes, pulling the covers back like removing an orange peel, the fruit beneath exposed. “Get in bed.”

“Dean, we need to talk about -”

“Cas, I just went up against the fuckin’ Wicked Witch of the North and I’ve got about ten hit points left before I pass the fuck out again. We can talk about it later. Right now, you need to get the fuck in bed, buddy, alright?”

_Yes._

A fumble at his buttons. He pulls at his sleeves, his thick fingers unsure. He doesn't talk; he doesn't speak. Pulls the tie from his throat, the shirt from his back. Still in a thin undershirt, still in slacks, oddly exposed and edgy. Here, here, at the edge and waiting, saying  _this is all I have to offer._ (He is no angel of Heaven, not now. A man with no history; a man with no name. Scars without stories to tell. What does he know of himself? O negative blood, well-cleaned nails, a man who burns fish in the pan. Who wants the incomplete?) 

Chest to chest, pressed up one against the other. The atoms of their hearts and their covalent bonds, their magnetic fields, striving toward each other. Yes, yes, connect pipe to pipe, the ductwork, the plumbing. Run the blood through the atrias, the ventricles. Let the pericardiums merge into one. Venae cavae. The last little bit of ourselves left over from before, back before God had separated us, cut us down the middle. His chef’s knife, his eight-inch blade sharp as a razor, sharp as obsidian. All wounds leave scars, our imperfect hearts beat on, ceaselessly into the future. If we’re lucky, we find our other half, seal ourselves back up again.

 _I love you._ Words like baking soda and vinegar, an explosion ready to blow off his jaw. _I love you I love you I love you._ Imperfect words. They get stuck on the dismount, get stuck between our teeth. Get a toothpick, pull it out, love stuck in our mouths. We’ll never be satisfied until we say it. _Get it out get it out get it out._ He has always wondered how humans experience love. Now he knows, a supernova in the chest, gooseflesh, the way a wave swells at the sight of land. Like a Kansas tornado loves to smash transformers, loves to watch the sparks hit the ground. Like a wildfire. Yes, like a wildfire and like the deep sea, places where there is no oxygen.

He cannot breathe. His fingers are too short. He is reaching for something, he doesn’t know what. He holds his breath, diving diving diving for the bottom of the sea. What will he find there? He holds his breath, watching as Dean mimics the movement, his eyes widening slightly. The hand on the side of the face, at the nape of the neck. (Does it matter whose hand is whose? It does not, their bodies are shared, are the same.)

“Cas,” Dean says, his mouth scarce centimeters away. The surface tension of their touch. The bounce upon the shore before the dive. “Cas, remember when I asked you -“

“Yes.”

“Yeah?”

“ _Yes._ ” He dives. The waves part to accept him, his clumsy form, his inexpert fumbling. Dean groans into the touch, mouth to mouth, tasting of salt and spit, the knocking of teeth. A bit of sweat, the curl of ache, a memory of a body that had once been a part of his own. Dive, dive, dive. Through the deep sea, through the blackness, through the terror of empty lungs. At the bottom, gather the oysters, bring them up. Put the knife in the shell, turn it like a key, the pearl inside. Puts his tongue between Dean’s lips, finds soft muscle there, brine, pearls that have never seen the sun.

Why is he still afraid? Dean warm against him, steady as a drum. To be human is to ache, to want, to fear. We are made of coarser material than angels ever have been. He doesn’t know why he is still afraid. Dean, Dean, who came too late, who came too soon, Castiel _aches_ knowing that he would have dreamt of Dean had he not been real. _If you weren’t real, I would make you up._

A mouth at his temple, a stranger at the gate. Dean and his warm limbs wrapped around Castiel's shoulders, changing the rules.“If I wake up and you’re not here," Dean says, whispering in the dark, "I’m gonna find another witch to curse _you_ this time.”

“I’ll be here, Dean.”

 

* * *

 

At the bottom of the ocean there are pearls. They sit in their oyster shells, waiting for us with our swimming skills, borrowing breaths in worlds we do not belong to, picking them out from the water. Down, down, further down. Past the blackness, past the pull of the current, the riptides that covet our bones, wanting to sweep us out to sea. To the emptiness, to forgetting. Down, further down. Why do we go? Because we hope for pearls. Because we are hungry and because it is our heart. 

Isn’t that the crux of it? Hope. We dare to whisper _I love you I love you I love you_ into the dark, into the deep sea, hoping it will be thrown back. Castiel and his shell, wrapped around Dean. Must we say it? (Yes, yes, tell it properly. Say _I love you, I always will._ )

Yes, yes, tell it properly.

_Happily ever after._

**Author's Note:**

> Always to my inspirations, to Jeanette Winterson and Anne Carson, to Dylan Thomas, to Joseph Arthur, to old Plato, and to the original fairytale-tellers, you know who you are.


End file.
